This was not the reception Beethoven had imagined. On 7 April 1805, when the last chord of his landmark Third Symphony rang out in Austria's Theater-an-der-Wien at the close of the first public performance, applause soon gave way to uneasy coughing. The dramatic and lengthy work, designed as a response to Napoleon's meteoric career, was dismissed by many in the Viennese audience as a misguided attempt to be original. Yet its new sound, marked by driving rhythms and military instrumentation, reflected the violent change in Europe and took orchestral music in a completely fresh direction.

This autumn the BBC is to attempt to present the 250-year-old tradition of the symphony in its proper context for the first time. Through an unprecedented series of television and radio programmes, alongside more than 60 orchestral performances, actor Simon Russell Beale and Sir Mark Elder, one of Britain's leading conductors, will jointly put the case that the changing sounds of the symphony are just as important a part of cultural history as the novel.

"The connection between large-scale public music-making and the events taking place in a particular society is definitely something that needs to be explored and laid open to a wider public," said Elder, music director of Manchester's renowned Hallé Orchestra.

Beethoven's Third Symphony, or Eroica (Italian for "heroic"), was a tribute to Napoleon's conquests and bore the name "Buonaparte" (the Corsican form of the family name) on the title page until the composer is believed to have changed his mind when Bonaparte made himself emperor. Beethoven's pupil and assistant, Ferdinand Ries, recalled that Beethoven was outraged.

"I was the first to tell him the news that Buonaparte had declared himself emperor, whereupon he broke into a rage and exclaimed: 'So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will tread under foot all the rights of man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men, become a tyrant!' " Beethoven went to the table, seized the top of the title page, tore it in half and threw it on the floor. The page had to be recopied and it was only then that the symphony received the title "Sinfonia Eroica".

Just as Beethoven felt moved by Bonaparte's campaigns, so 130 years later Shostakovich felt driven to compose his Leningrad Symphony in 1941 in response to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. It was to become an elegy for the 25 million Soviet citizens killed during the second world war.

As the Observer's music critic, Fiona Maddocks, points out, though, not every symphony worth inspection was inspired by the darker side of its historical period. While Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony may have been a reaction to the tragedy of war, Dvorák's New World Symphony and Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony were both responses to the discovery of new countries and the delights of the age of travel. During Mendelssohn's grand tour of Europe between 1829 and 1831, he wrote to his parents to explain his emotions: "This is Italy! And now has begun what I have always thought … to be the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it."

At the centre of the BBC season of programmes is a new BBC4 series, Symphony, which studies the personal and social stories behind a selection of key masterpieces. The series, presented by Beale, will go out in four "movements": Genesis and Genius; Beethoven and Beyond; New Nations and New Worlds; and Revolution and Rebirth. It aims to chart how the symphony became both a symbol of freedom and the tool of totalitarian regimes. Using private letters and diary extracts, it examines the lives of the great composers, from Haydn, the first to develop the symphony, through Mozart, Berlioz, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Sibelius, Copland, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Beethoven, who with his nine symphonic works did most to shape the form, is at the heart of the season.

Nick Dear's award-winning BBC film drama, Eroica, which tells the story behind the creation of Beethoven's revolutionary Third Symphony and stars Ian Hart as the composer, is one of a selection of archive broadcasts also going out as part of the season. The soundtrack features Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestra Révolutionaire et Romantique using the same number of orchestral players that Beethoven had at his disposal for the first private performance in 1804.

Also shown will be Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra's Proms performance of Beethoven's monumental Ninth Symphony; a rare performance of Sibelius's first symphonic masterpiece, Kullervo, conducted by Colin Davis; and Roger Norrington's radical take on Mahler's epic Ninth Symphony from this year's Proms.

The term "symphony" comes from the Greek words "syn" and "phone", meaning "together" and "sound", and it was first used in 16th-century Italy, when Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli wrote a work for voices and musical instruments called the Sacrae Symphoniae. By the 18th century, composers were calling the overture to an opera, or an oratorio, the "sinfonia". These pieces would often consist of three parts: two lively sections sandwiched around a slower one.

Some early sinfonias began to be performed alone at concerts and so composers started to write them as independent works. They were initially commissioned by, and played for, the rich, but the history of the symphony since then has seen moments of great popular impact.

"It is true that the development of the orchestra centred around the courts and the principalities of Europe and around the leading members of the aristocracy," admits Elder, "but the idea that a group of musicians could tell a story together in one piece was then pioneered by Haydn. And his work is still as incredibly popular now as it was designed to be."

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) wrote 104 symphonies, most with four movements: a majestic introduction, then a slow movement, followed by a minuet and a lively finale.

The length of a symphony can vary from under 15 minutes to more than an hour. In the 18th century, an orchestra consisted of strings, two oboes, bassoons or flutes, the odd clarinet, two horns and an occasional trumpet and drums. But in the following two centuries its size inflated enormously. The woodwind section ballooned, adding the piccolo, English horn, bass clarinet and the contra bassoon, and the brass picked up as many as eight horns, five trumpets, four trombones and a tuba, to say nothing of the growth of the percussion section and the inclusion of an organ. Nowadays the powerful impact of the volume of sound created by all these instruments has been overtaken by the arrival of electronic amplification.

But Elder argues that the future of this grand old musical form is still rosy. "As long as a symphony orchestra can still play together and be supported by a public, I believe the symphony will maintain its position at the centre of the musical repertoire," he said.

Jan Younghusband, the BBC's commissioning editor for classical music on television, sees the collaboration with BBC Radio coupled with the use of two main presenters, one an enthusiast and one a leading practitioner, as crucial to the season. "These composers were inspired by the world around them and this is the first time a broadcaster has looked at this in such a definitive, wide-ranging way. We wanted to try to speak to the broader audience, as well as classical music fans, about what this great art form is," she said.

BBC Radio 3 is to feature a range of complementary programming in Essential Symphony, and between 4 November and 2 December it will broadcast more than 60 symphonies. Afternoon on 3's symphony cycle will include performances from all the BBC orchestras around Britain and, on 15 November, Radio 3 is to recreate the extraordinary concert of December 1808, when Beethoven premiered his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Fourth Piano Concerto.

The BBC Philharmonic will play the Sixth Symphony live and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales will play the Fifth.

"As the BBC's home of classical music, I'm delighted that on Radio 3 we can offer listeners the chance to hear complete performances of over 60 symphonies featuring the BBC orchestras," said Roger Wright, the station's controller.

Elder applauds the crusading attitude behind the season. "I hope these programmes will soften some of the barriers that seem to exist for those people who think they don't know enough to enjoy this kind of music," he said. "People should be encouraged to take from music exactly what they want to take, and not what society tells them they must."